Has BBC lost any credibility with the participants of A2K?

The BBC is playing at power games
By Janet Daley
(Filed: 03/09/2003)

There can be little question now that David Kelly was sacrificed - in the vulgar phrase, "hung out to dry" - by all the principal players in this great public drama.

The question that remains is, at what point did the chain of events become inexorable? When did this appalling process take on the inevitability that made it the stuff of high tragedy, rather than simply misadventure?

First, Andrew Gilligan created a story out of their private conversation that Dr Kelly found (as he told everyone, with stunning consistency, from the foreign affairs select committee to his own daughter) virtually unrecognisable.

Gilligan then effectively unmasked him as the source of Susan Watts's account and therefore of his (Gilligan's) own, in an email to David Chidgey, a Liberal Democrat committee member, whose party was sympathetic to the anti-war position.

Then Dr Kelly's employers at the MoD participated in his exposure, despite having given him explicit assurances that they would not do so.

Was this under pressure from Downing Street that, apparently ruthlessly, demanded that his identity be made public? Almost undoubtedly. But given what had transpired, how could the Prime Minister's office have done otherwise?

The charge that the Gilligan story had made against Tony Blair and later, by name, Alastair Campbell, was the most serious allegation that it is possible to make against a government. What was being claimed was that the country had been sent to war, and British lives had been lost, on the basis of a lie.

This is practically tantamount to accusing the Prime Minister of murder. It is far more grave than any accusation of financial corruption or even criminal misdemeanour in office.

To make such an assertion was effectively to say to every British family that had lost a serving soldier in Iraq: your son, or brother, or husband, died on false premises, to serve the vanity of a deceitful political leader.

It is absolutely inconceivable that this could have been allowed to stand as a story having the imprimatur of the BBC. It is vital to note this point.

Had Gilligan simply published his piece in the Mail on Sunday, the whole farago could have been dismissed as tabloid sensationalism. But because it was broadcast on the BBC and never retracted, it flew round the world, and became the substance for a million queries of the Government's veracity in the run-up to war.

It is appalling, but almost irresistible, to conclude that, if Gilligan had not broadcast his original report and if its implications had not then been picked up and spun out by the media - especially the BBC itself, which led its news coverage for weeks on "the suspicious case of the WMD that haven't been found" - Dr Kelly might still be alive.

But most crucially: if the BBC had agreed promptly to some sort of correction or retraction of its earliest version of the Gilligan story, the entire train of events would have been stopped in its tracks.

There is some degree of mystery as to why the BBC did not do this. A newspaper caught in a similar position - that is, with a story it cannot stand up - would certainly be advised by its lawyers to print a correction and an apology.

I have seen no reference to any advice the BBC's lawyers may have given, in any of the material released thus far to the Hutton Inquiry. Instead we see the minutes of meetings with the BBC Board of Governors, in which doubts about the soundness of the Gilligan story are buried under an avalanche of rather puerile defiance of "government pressure".

The chairman of the governors, Gavyn Davies, seems to have interpreted the furious demands by Mr Campbell on behalf of the Government for an explicit correction as illicit political pressure that threatened to compromise the BBC's independence.

In an email to the members of the board, he writes: "I remain firmly of the view that, in a big picture sense, it is absolutely critical for the BBC to emerge from this row without being seen to buckle in the face of government pressure."

This was in spite of the fact that the Today programme had itself decided to change the substance of that early contentious report. Indeed, the question of the truth of the Gilligan story seems to fall right out of the picture in this round of mud-wrestling with the Government.

One BBC governor, Fabian Monds, rises to Mr Davies's call to arms with the extraordinary statement that any doubts about the Gilligan account should be deliberately overlooked: "There does appear to be some uncertainty of the claim by Andrew Gillgan's source. But this is less important than responding vigorously to the extravagant accusations of lying from Alastair Campbell and others." (My italics.)

The truth of the story is "less important" than that the BBC should be seen to stand up to government pressure? What kind of journalistic standards are these?

And government pressure to do what? Simply to admit what you have already done - which is to say, change the story as it went out on later broadcast reports. And, given the gravity of the charge, were Mr Campbell's accusations against the BBC "extravagant"?

Did the governors - while they played out their power game with Downing Street - have any conception of the gravity of what the corporation had done?

It would seem not. Mr Davies, in his testimony to Hutton, wondered why Mr Campbell had not simply taken his dissatisfaction to the BBC complaints unit. (Presumably he should have rung the duty officer at White City and filed his complaint in the usual way.)

The arrogance - not to say, the amateurishness - of it all is simply breathtaking.

3 September 2003[News]: Kelly 'driven to suicide by the public disgrace'

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